The year is 2140. After numerous wars and several environmental disasters, only two world powers remain; the United Civilized States (»UCS«), covering the American continent, Western Europe and North Africa, and the Eurasian Dynasty (»ED«) covering the coherent landmasses of Eastern Europe and Asia.

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About This Game

The year is 2140. After numerous wars and several environmental disasters, only two world powers remain; the United Civilized States (»UCS«), covering the American continent, Western Europe and North Africa, and the Eurasian Dynasty (»ED«) covering the coherent landmasses of Eastern Europe and Asia. The damage caused by the long wars led both world powers to evacuate the population to recently built underground cities.

Australia and most parts of Africa were sacrificed during the long wars, which lasted several decades. Highly toxic biological and chemical weapons were developed on these continents, leaving them so badly contaminated, that no human life can survive there. Not even the use of robots and machines is possible. The general opinion was that these continents would forever remain uninhabitable, and they were wiped from every map. Most of the world's population forgot that this land ever existed.

Natural resources are becoming scarce and have to be extracted above ground. There have been a number of small conflicts between the UCS and the ED, the last of which escalated and became a fierce and bitter war - the final world war. Only one side can win. This final war will decide who will get the last of the available natural resources and ultimately rule the world.

EARTH 2140 is a real time strategy game involving the high tech warfare of the 22nd century. More than 50 exciting missions, an unprecedented AI, more than 100 ground units, mechs, flying units and ships, strategic orders like formations, escorts and others make Earth 2140 a high class product.

This version of Earth 2140 supports resolutions up to full HD and contains both Mission Packs (Mission Pack 1 and Mission Pack 2).

My first PC game, oh the memories... It's an all round awesome RTS (for it's time). Great graphics, sound, lengthy and thrilling campaign, awesome units (laser tanks FTW!), interesting story and setting. It's a pity that the sequels got progressively worse. The last iteration of the series (2160) was a complete disaster and the 2150 was just meh.

I always wanted to try out the Earth series, beeing a fan of strategy games and all. So naturally I started with Earth 2140 with some decent expectations. Got the entire series for a around 3$. Figured they are very old games and the price cant go any lower than that.

I was excited to see that 2140 has an HD version,but was quickly disappointed to see that HD means that it can be played on newer machines and some new resolutions are supported.

From the intro of the game I saw that something was off. There was a product placement for a popular beverage in the somewhat distant post apocalyptic future and a display of different type of robots and machines that was suppose to set up the story. I did not make anything out story wise from that.

Onto the main screen was excited to see the way it was created, like you as a character shifted your vision from left to right and was a bit riddled about the games factions (which are two , your typical Europe vs America factions). Nothing too bad about that. Was thrilled to see that there are two mission packs included as well. Hey ,more content,that is always nice.

Was very excited to see a database of all buildings ,vehicles and soldiers in the main menu. After browsing through them, everything was looking pretty good.

Until I actually started playing the game. I can understand that this is an old strategy game that may have been a pioneer at its age,but hey, so was Starcraft or Red Alert. This game disappointed in almost every expect imagineable to me.

Let’s start with the story, which by the way I had to research it to get an understanding on what the hell is going on. Basically some big war went on and most of the most continents except Europe and America are wiped out and now these two factions fight for the remainder of Earth’s resources by destroying everything in their path. Not THAT bad, really hoped that the story would develop somehow, but it didn’t.

Every mission starts with a radar like briefing with a terrain background that has really hard to read text that makes you want to skip the briefing alltogether. Even when you read it , every mission is bascially destroy the enemy base or capture some random buildings. The variety is almost non-existent.

Pressing on to the cutscenes,that I really hoped to bring some plot into the game. Nope, did not happen. Every cutscene in the game is basically pointless. It just shows some random units atacking each other or patroling some buildings. No story info whatsoever.

Progression wise (I played as Europe) you basically just have to retake some huge chunks of Europe and North Africa Back and then go conquer America. Again this is not that bad (most strategy games have this) but this time it is so poorly executed and implemented that it makes not care at all what happens in this game.

Going towards graphics,well nothing to complain, the usual 2D sprites that were specific for that time.Good enough. But damn, there are like only 2 animations for fighting in the entire game (that I have recognized), one of wich ( the rocket with the smoke trail) beeing so overly used and annoying to see to some extreme repetition.

You jump into the game mission and you are left to figure everything out by yourself. There are no tutorials (which is kind of ok, this beeing specific for that time when the game was launched). That would have been a good idea, IF the menu that is a C&C/Dune type of menu was not so completely counter intuitive and lacked actual ease of use.It took me several minutes to just figure out how to get resources in this game, which could have been exciting, but to me personally it was a disaster. When you do manage to set up your resource gathering buildings and your production buildings, you just spam random infantry and tanks, in masses, and you go roflstomp the enemies.

Oh and speaking about enemy AI. With the HD version, they somehow managed to break it. Enemies rarely attack your base and aparently don’t produce units of their own at all. This can only result in zero lack of interest in replayability or sense of beeing challenged or beeing a strategy game, SOME STRATEGY. You just build up some random piles of units and go kamikaze with them until the mission is accomplished.

The units design is kind of interesting,especially for that time. On the other side the unit voiceovers are basically the same for ALL units,which makes everything utterly annoying to click,really fast. Also unit wise,the pathing system and the way each unit atacks or finds the enemy is completely rubbish and painful to watch. The unit selection is clunky and feels un easy as well. The selection method gives you almost no info about what type of units you have (It just briefly shows the name of a unit and immediately disappears).

While searching through the menu tabs, I found everything to be placed so badly . Buildings menu is a mess. Units selection menu (yes you have to click a different tab to see unit selection menu), feels useless. Unit behiavour menu set some interest,but considering the overall gameplay,it completely failed to me as well.

On to the next part, which is ,yes , music. The music is decent,but NOT for a damn strategygame. Each track feels so randomly generated that it feels like it doesn’t have anything to do with the gameplay. On some occasions I noticed some type of music that you would normally find in soft porn or lounge bars. Good music,really bad implemented for this type of game.

Ultimately I really wanted to like Earth 2140, but it just could not happen. It tries to do several things but accomplishes almost nothing and you are better off with a C&C/Dune/Starcraft like experience when it comes to RTS. This game fell so far behind the back that it really doesn’t deserves such a lengthy review.

4/10. Not Recommended. Don’t bother with this one if you cherish your free time!

Earth 2140 is a solid real-time strategy game with two unique factions, each of them bringing along a decent variety of units and weaponry. Unfortunately the user interface and controls leave something to be desired, resulting in a bit of confusion when you are trying to build and manage your base and units.

But the weakest link in the chain is the behaviour of the A.I., and its urge to accumulate as much units as possible around the base, leaving you with the challenging agenda to confront and destroy a massive defense. Especially in the first levels this kind of tactical approach can be frustrating.

Nevertheless it remains a classic RTS experience with an interesting unit design and combat system. --

My rating system consists of six categories in descending order of importance:

Earth 2140 is probably a good game at its core, but this is an utter crap port. The AI is bugged, the controls aren't very good (the mouse is kind of floaty and slow), and a lot of common resolutions aren't supported. Thank goodness I only spent $0.69 on this crap.

I would recommend this game only to people who have the patience to get to know it. There is no tutorial or anything like that to help new players, although watching Lets Plays and walkthroughs on youtube was helpful. Once you get over the original 'WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON' phase on first start up, it turns into an enjoyable, fast-paced RTS, even if the AI is a little dumb on normal difficulty.

My main criticism, though, is the story. It's barely there and it does a poor job of letting you know what's actually going on. The text screens also show you a blink-and-you'll miss it mission objective, so make sure you give them a proper read.

I played the Steam version a while ago. The AI was broken, so enemy units seldom launched attacks at my base. The AI simply built a huge, impenetrable field of tanks, and any attempt to attack the AI base failed. It looks like it would be a good game if the AI worked, though.

A good game. Good tactical depth, good immersion and awesome units. Lacking some newer RTS features, but still very fun and challenging. Pathfinding is decent, with the occasional hiccup. Some bugs still remain, although most are just minor annoyances. Overall, I really like this game, definitely better than the sequels and definitely more immersive than many modern RTSs which have felt more tame in terms of the feeling of destruction and devastation.

I have spent enough time to know that this game is truly the worst RTS game I have ever played.

Good points:

The graphics are okay as it does not look terrible but I only say okay because the graphics are pretty awful in the CG scenes which is to be expected but there is a difference between trying and laziness and it fits the latter.One song was genuinely good in the soundtrack, when this song came on, I never wanted it to leave as it is catchy and has that RTS feel to it.

You can save anywhere because you REALLY need it in this game.

aaaannnnnnddd that is about it.

Bad points

The gameplay: The gameplay does start off like a traditional RTS game with the base building and atacking but after the first few levels, it gets very boring very quickly because building a base is tedious as well as building an army. Building a base is simple enough, find a patch to lay the transport down on to convert it into a building. And that is fine unless your base is getting attacked and for the most part, that happens constantly and it gets even worse by the end making the base building just an absolute chore. To get resources,you must mine which again sounds fine but it is annoying when you do not know where to mine because the game never tells you so you have to get the mine to search around that could actually expose itself to the enemy and it is done for then because the transports move slower than a snail.

At least in good RTS games, it actually indicates where you can mine rather than guess so that is poor usability for the player there. Another thing as well is the processing of building an army as it can take up to 1 hours alone to build a huge one and even then, it can get decimated instantly by the enemy but when your army tries that, it barely damages them meaning that your army is as weak as a child and the enemy has as much armour as the fear bullies have on people so it can be done but just in a horrible way. The gameplay is an absolute mess and there have been missions where it has took me 4 hours alone to pass because of how poor the maps are meaning that the levels are longer for no reason.

Let me set the scene, there is a map where 75% of it is land and the other 25% of it is water, again sounds fine. Well to get your land troops across water, you have to order these boats where they can only take 1 mech or 6 infantry units so the process is long and the water strech is not far either, we are talking 50 years here and there is even a ledge where at least the infantry could cross but no, it is not the case at all and you have to do the tedium of getting 1 group over, get the boat back to the other side and repeat. I guess I could accept that situation if it was only done in 1 mission but nope, it is set in at least 6 of the missions and cue the anger and the annoyance.

Another annoying thing is how the enemy structures are built as there are rocket towers all over some parts of the map in many levels and then you have mines to deal with in the later levels. The devs were seriously mine-happy in this game as there is literally about 50 of them scattered inch by inch to each other and you can only have a miner unit to sweep them but it is as riveting as cleaning rubbish up someone else has made at a club at the end of the night, it is not fun AT ALL. There were even parts where I had to save almost every 5 seconds I did something so I can continue because resources is so limited that it can make a mission go unnecessarily complicated very quickly especially when you are down to your last few units. It is ridiculous and I should not have to do that but nope, I had to do that for several missions.

AI: The AI is also awful because the enmy is just cheap because when you are taking over a base, enemies out of nowhere just appear and attack your base so you have to make sure your base is well defended otherwise it can be destroyed very fast by infantry units of all things. The AI for your team however is seriously some of the worst because when you point them to somewhere, they do get there for the most part but there have been loads of instances where the units go a different direction that could expose them or they just do their own thing such as keep moving somwhere which gets them killed and this becomes a lot more common later on in the game making the controls annoying.

The music: Like I said before, there was one good song and that was it. Well unfortunately this was the case as there are only 9 songs in the whole game and there is just not enough songs here making the music monotonous very quickly after it's first loop. Unlike in Command And Conquer where you can loop a certain song over and over and the fact that the quality of the music is 100000x better than the music here is non-existent because you can choose a track but you cannot loop it over because it is already on a set path to loop the whole soundtrack over and over again, I am not impressed.

And then comes the quality of the music, it is BAD and I mean bad because the songs are either too boring to listen to, too inspired to listen to, or the songs do not fit in the game at all. Seriously the one song sounds like something from a prime time TV programme for old people and does not fit this game AT ALL. If you want to make a soundtrack for an RTS, THEN MAKE IT FITTING BY GETTING THE SONG PUMP YOU UP TO TAKE DOWN THE ENEMY BASES AND NOT SONGS THAT FIT FOR GARDENING SHOWS! The music is awful, concluded.

The story: Okay, I was not expecting some deep story but there really isn't one because your faction are taking over countries and that is it. What is bad is the cutscenes as they are pointless since it just shows random artillery doing something and it does not set the scene at all. When you conquer a country (via 5 missions each country), it just takes you back to the world map so you can enter another country and there is no cutscene at the end of each company and it just make me feel so empty and made me feel like I achieved nothing and I wasted my time and I really did because 40 hours on this damn game is overkill! There is just no lore to this game, no background, no idea how it came to two faction in war of each other, absolutely nothing.

In conclusion, this game is not only a mess but an absolute disaster as almost nothing comes out of it and just because the price of this game is cheap, it does not mean you should buy it as you should put it on something a LOT better than rubbish. This is easily one of the worst games I have played (and that is saying something as I play lots of games) as it fails to be a RTS game, it fails to be interesting and most of all, it fails to be a playable game.

Avoid this at all costs, save your money and save your time as this game just wastes it!

Terrible... The graphics are quite bad even for the time when this came out. The music is unlisteniable. The controls... That's the worst part. There is awfully little depth to this game, it is unbalaned and has many issues. As for actually building things? There is no tutorial so I don't know how to